I've just received my review copy of Dear World & Everyone In it: New Poetry In The UK, edited by Nathan Hamilton. I'll briefly comment on it, here, in weeks to come, but my main review on the collection will appear in The Wolf magazine. What I will say now, and here, is that, surely, anyone interested in following the development of the young British poets generation of the last 15 years will want to own a copy of this collection, or at least read it, as it forms a part of the ongoing discussion.
When you open your mouth to speak, are you smart? A funny question from a great song, but also, a good one, when it comes to poets, and poetry. We tend to have a very ambiguous view of intelligence in poetry, one that I'd say is dysfunctional. Basically, it goes like this: once you are safely dead, it no longer matters how smart you were. For instance, Auden was smarter than Yeats , but most would still say Yeats is the finer poet; Eliot is clearly highly intelligent, but how much of Larkin 's work required a high IQ? Meanwhile, poets while alive tend to be celebrated if they are deemed intelligent: Anne Carson, Geoffrey Hill , and Jorie Graham , are all, clearly, very intelligent people, aside from their work as poets. But who reads Marianne Moore now, or Robert Lowell , smart poets? Or, Pound ? How smart could Pound be with his madcap views? Less intelligent poets are often more popular. John Betjeman was not a very smart poet, per se. What do I mean by smart?
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